


The Year Between

by Larathia



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-20 01:12:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1491244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Larathia/pseuds/Larathia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Through the Year" - though not quite a full year, between when Martha first leaves the Doctor, and where she briefly rejoins him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Year Between

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Juliet316](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Juliet316/gifts).



She left the Doctor at the end of June, 2007, to finish her medical training and to ...to get the hell over whatever this wasn't, and was never going to be.

She spent July of 2008 focusing entirely on her family and on her training. And it hurt, of course - how many people like the Doctor could there _be_ in the universe, after all, over and above the pain of a breakup. And it was a breakup, even if the relationship was entirely one-sided. The side in question had been hers. Her mother noticed, of course, but - for once - had enough sense not to try and 'cure' it by introducing her to new people. There was only one Doctor, and she'd have to get her feet back on the ground on her own, in her own time.

Sometime in August, she stopped waking up with the feeling that the slightest push would unbalance her emotions. By the end of August, there were occasions - quite rare yet, but occurring - where her smile felt natural and not something she wore to put patients, parents, and everyone else at ease.

In September, one of her instructors took her aside to commend her improvement in focus and diagnosis, which was quite possibly his way of noting that she'd returned to an acceptable standard of professional conduct. 

In October, she had to have a Talk with Leo about the girl he was seeing, and what it was doing to the family. And it was an entirely normal, family-ish thing for her to have to do, but when it was over and Leo had stalked off, she realized that she didn't feel as drained as she thought she would be. She caught herself thinking _Well, once you've thrown Harry Potter spells at Shakesperean witches, giving your brother a talking to isn't really that big a deal, is it?_

As November set in, she started testing herself. Taking on greater challenges in her classwork just to see how well she could do, how far she could push herself. It wasn't always successful, but her instructors were as impressed with her as she was with herself, realizing that her perceptions of the world's limits, or her own, were just not there anymore. She didn't think about the Doctor, anymore, not as such. She knew the number to call if she needed him, but as December rolled in she realized that more and more the answer simply was, _it's okay, I've got this._

The challenges paid off, and she received her license and diploma at the end of December. 

She'd been to the ends of Time and back. It had left its own mark on her. Martha Jones ushered in the year 2009 with her family, and paper streamers, and a glass of reasonably acceptable champagne. And she realized that, despite not yet being done with her medical training and her family being the same near-insane people they had always been, she was happy.

In January, she received a visitor at her door who wore a uniform she wasn't entirely familiar with, who introduced herself as an "associate of the Doctor's". 

At first Martha was inclined to just shut the door on her; she'd moved on, she didn't want to go ripping open old wounds. But the woman had said 'associate'- not 'companion', or 'friend'. And they talked, over tea, about a lot of things that Martha hadn't been at all certain she could talk to _anyone_ about.

At the end of that talk, Martha agreed to join UNIT.

By February, she'd also met Torchwood, and had to privately re-calibrate her scale of weird to not _necessarily_ have to include the Doctor or Jack Harkness, who was if anything even more prone to random chaos. But she'd also found she could date again, when the secret of the Doctor wasn't sitting in the way.

By March she'd accumulated enough research on the nature of death to write a paper, but as it included data on people who were dead but still walking, she simply presented her findings to UNIT for consideration around promotion time. And got engaged, thinking this would be a good forward direction.

By April, the dead people weren't walking around anymore, and she attended their funerals with an eye on Jack. Men who couldn't die, at least not in the way everyone else did, had certain reactions she was coming to expect when death happened to other people.

In May, the Doctor breezed right back into her life, and she found herself in the Tardis again. And while she loved the adventure, and the new world - and the Doctor's new companion was very much exactly what he needed, and she wholly approved - she found, to her great relief, that the old pain wasn't there anymore. She might miss the adventures, but she'd gotten a new life and a new love and really, UNIT wasn't in any way _less_ adventure than the Tardis.

Almost a year after she'd said goodbye to preserve her sanity, Martha said goodbye again - this time as a fully trained Doctor herself, with her own career ahead of her, and her own challenges, and a love that loved her back. Not a circle, but a spiral, heading upward.


End file.
